Settlement proposed to resolve PPL billing issues; 48k customers had usage hiked by 50%
KAYLEE LINDENMUTH / SHENANDOAH SENTINEL FILE - A PPL truck in 2017.
HARRISBURG – A settlement has been proposed that would resolve the billing issues PPL Electric Utilities had about a year ago, where at least 48,000 customers had their usage hiked by 50%.
The Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is evaluating a joint settlement proposed by their Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement and PPL, in which PPL will pay $1 Million in a civil penalty and absorb $16 Million in costs.
The PUC says they began an investigation in early 2023 regarding PPL billing issues after a large number of complaints regarding unusually high, or low, estimated bills or missing bills. Complaints also mentioned the lack of adequate customer service support resulting in consumers being unable to reach PPL Call Center representatives to discuss their billing concerns.
Regulators said that the billing issues originated in December 2022, when PPL discovered that customer meter data was not transferring from the utility’s meter data management software to their customer service system.
The inability to transfer actual meter data backed up normal customer billing operations and resulted in sending estimated December 2022 bills.
Later, human error caused additional incorrect bills to be issued, while some customers received no bills, and issues with bill estimation resulted in wildly inaccurate bills.
According to the proposed joint settlement, more than 48,000 PPL accounts received no bills during one or more months between December 2022 and April 2023 billing periods, and during that same period more than 91,000 unique PPL accounts received no bills.
Additionally, between December 2022 and January 2023 nearly 795,000 estimated bills were issued by PPL, and a total of more than 860,000 estimated bills were issued between December 2022 and May 2023.
An analysis of estimated bills issued by PPL revealed that 67.31% (261,104 customers) of the bills had an estimate differing from the customers’ actual usage of 10% or greater.
Of these bills, one-third indicated an estimate that varied from actual by more than 25%. And nearly 48,000 customer bills were based on an estimate differing from actual usage by more than 50%.
Further, over 82,000 estimated bills were impacted by missing or inaccurate supply charges – resulting in a process were PPL canceled the initial estimated bills and rebilled accounts to correct errors – generating consumer confusion and creating a complicated tangle of bills that took months to unravel.
Finally, customers who attempted to contact PPL about billing issues were faced with extremely long wait times or were unable to reach the utility at all. Call center data from the period between January and April 2023 showed that 41% of calls to PPL were abandoned without customers being able to reach a representative.
Under the terms of the terms of the proposed settlement, PPL will pay a $1 million civil penalty, along with a series of corrective actions in response to these billing issues.
Additionally, PPL has voluntary agreed to absorb more than $16 million in additional costs related to rectifying their billing issues, including:
- Approximately $2.3 million in voluntarily waived late fees;
- Approximately $7.8 million of additional bad debt expense arising out of the voluntary service termination moratorium;
- Forgoing collection of approximately $1.7 million from customers who were underbilled in the estimation true-up process;
- An additional approximately $3.7 million of unplanned costs in engaging external vendors;
- And approximately $700,000 of unbudgeted employee overtime expenses.
Per the proposed settlement, PPL will not seek to recover any of those related costs in future rate cases or in any other manner.
The proposed joint settlement has been submitted for review and consideration by the PUC Commissioners, who will make a final determination in this matter.
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